Category: Neurology

Categories : NeurologyTags :

New Test Picks up Concussion Biomarkers in Saliva

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A new test has been found to effectively pick up concussion biomarkers in the saliva of rugby players.

This paves the way for a non-invasive, easy-to-use pitch-side test to rapidly detect concussions for early treatment. Concussion is a serious problem in contact sports, with players such as college American Football athletes consistently underestimating its risk. Missing a concussion can have a range of consequences, from delayed recovery to more serious (albeit rare) injuries such as traumatic brain swelling.

Detecting concussions requires an assessment by a clinician of the signs and symptoms of the injury. However, recent advances in DNA sequencing technology have made it possible to use small non-coding RNAs (sncRNAs) as biomarkers in rapid tests. sncRNAs regulate the expression of different cellular proteins associated with various diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

t is thought that since saliva can receive cellular signals directly from the cranial nerves in the mouth and throat, biomarkers from a brain injury would quickly show up.

A panel of 14 sncRNAs differentiated concussed players from those where traumatic brain injury had been suspected but ruled out, and from the comparison group, both straight after the game and 36–48 hours later.

Over two seasons, samples were collected before the rugby season began from 1028 players from the two elite professional tiers, and during standardised ‘gold standard’ head injury assessments at three time points—during the game, afterwards, and 36–48 hours later from 156 of these players .

The researchers also took saliva samples from a comparison group of 102 uninjured players, as well as 66 with muscle or joint injuries, and so had not had head injury assessments.

However, the researchers stressed that the observational study nature and design of this study cannot show that the biomarker test is any better than a gold standard clinical test for concussion.

“In community sport, [sncRNAs] may provide a non-invasive diagnostic test that is comparable in accuracy to the level of assessment available in a professional sport setting,” while the test could be added to current head injury evaluation protocols at the elite level,” they add.

And as the biology of concussion is still not fully understood, sncRNAs might help to shed light on the response to injury as this evolves over time, they suggest.

“The detection of signatures of concussion at early time points in saliva (a non-invasively sampled biofluid) presents both at the pitch side, and in primary care and emergency medicine departments, an opportunity to develop a new and objective diagnostic tool for this common clinical presentation,” they conclude.

As an addendum to their findings, they added: “A patented salivary concussion test is in the process of being commercialized as an over-the-counter test for elite male athletes.

“Meanwhile our research team aims to collect further samples from players in two elite men’s rugby competitions to provide additional data to expand the test and develop its use. This will guide the prognosis and safe return to play after concussion and further establish how the test will work alongside the head injury assessment process.”

The researchers plan to add more participants to the SCRUM study, such as female athletes and community players.
Source: Medical Xpress

Journal information: Valentina Di Pietro et al. Unique diagnostic signatures of concussion in the saliva of male athletes: the Study of Concussion in Rugby Union through MicroRNAs (SCRUM), British Journal of Sports Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2020-103274

Categories : NeurologyTags :

‘Zombie’ Genes Lurch into Activity After Brain Death

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Researchers have found that genes in cells in recently harvested brain tissue remained active for up to 24 hours – and some ‘zombie’ genes even increased their expression.

Using recently harvested brain tissue as a surrogate for actual death, the researchers investigated the activity of genes.

Dr Jeffrey Loeb, the John S Garvin Professor and head of neurology and rehabilitation at the UIC College of Medicine and corresponding author on the paper, noticed along with his team that the pattern of gene expression in fresh human brain tissue differed from published reports of postmortem brain gene expression from people without neurological disorders or from people with a wide variety of neurological disorders, ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s.

“We decided to run a simulated death experiment by looking at the expression of all human genes, at time points from zero to 24 hours, from a large block of recently collected brain tissues, which were allowed to sit at room temperature to replicate the postmortem interval,” Dr Loeb said.

They found that some ‘zombie’ genes were more expressed after the simulated death. These were specific to glial cells, which have an inflammatory role. The researchers observed that these cells continued to grow long arm-like appendages for many hours after death.

“That glial cells enlarge after death isn’t too surprising given that they are inflammatory and their job is to clean things up after brain injuries like oxygen deprivation or stroke,” said Dr Loeb.

Dr Loeb is director of the UI NeuroRepository, which preserves human brain tissues from patients with neurological disorders who gave their consent to use their tissue after death, or during surgery to treat disorders such as epilepsy, where some brain tissue is removed to treat the condition in lesionectomy. This procedure involves removing structural brain lesions — typically malformations of cortical development, low-grade neoplasms, or vascular malformations. Some of the tissue harvested through these various means can be used for research, as in this study.

About 80% of genes, many of which are involved in cellular ‘housekeeping’ activities, kept functioning up to 24 hours after death. Another group of genes involved in cognition and seizure control faded within a few hours of death. These are important to the study of schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, according to Dr Loeb.

The ‘zombie’ genes ramped up activity as the others were winding down, with these changes peaking at 12 hours.

“Our findings don’t mean that we should throw away human tissue research programs, it just means that researchers need to take into account these genetic and cellular changes, and reduce the post-mortem interval as much as possible to reduce the magnitude of these changes,” Dr Loeb said. “The good news from our findings is that we now know which genes and cell types are stable, which degrade, and which increase over time so that results from postmortem brain studies can be better understood.”

Source: Medical Xpress

Journal information: Fabien Dachet et al. Selective time-dependent changes in activity and cell-specific gene expression in human postmortem brain, Scientific Reports (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-85801-6

Categories : Neurology PaediatricsTags :

Boy’s Brain Rewires After Stroke as a Newborn

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Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Researchers have reported the case of a boy whose brain was able to rewire after a severe stroke that damaged much of his brain.

In the seventh grade, 13-year old Daniel Carr amazed his baseball coach with his ability to throw with his left hand, saying that it was the fastest he’d ever seen. However, he was unable to properly catch with his right hand.

Hearing this from the coach, Kellie Carr, Daniel’s mother, realised that his son had a number of quirks, such as favouring his left side when he was an infant, and his left-handedness emerged well before the normal age of two or three. However, she was unable to get any explanation for this until she met Nico Dosenbach, MD, PhD, who informed her that her son had had a stroke when he was a newborn.

MRI scans revealed large, bilateral voids in Daniel’s brain, but incredibly, he had no cognitive, behavioural or motor problems other than a lack of strength and dexterity in his right arm.
“The extent of Daniel’s injuries may be on the edge of what’s compatible with life,” Dosenbach said.

Dainel’s remarkable recovery can be explained by his young age at the time the stroke.

“The brain can compensate more quickly and completely for strokes sustained in early childhood,” he said. “By contrast, large strokes in adults often cause death or severe functional impairment with little chance of recovery. However, the mechanics behind this are only beginning to be understood.”

More MRI scans were done on Daniel’s brain to determine its structure and pathology. Dosenbach and Laumann conducted high-resolution functional MRI scans to understand how Daniel’s brain had reorganised itself.
With his mother’s consent, Daniel was further tested over a period of six years, including batteries of neurological tests, and more scans done. Timothy Laumann, MD, PhD, now a fourth-year psychiatry resident at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, had the expertise to analyse the data.

Looking at his medical records, the physician-scientists noted that he had an infection as a newborn, and was hospitalised with an IV drip. However, none of the physicians had suspected a stroke, which happens to one in every 4000 newborns. Daniel was sent home after a week, the doctors having suspected a viral infection.

“The risk of having a pediatric stroke greatly increases with a medical problem, especially an infection during the newborn period,” Dosenbach said. “However, usually there are more obvious signs that a stroke occurred. I can understand how no one suspected it.”

The researchers compared the images of Daniel’s brain to others of young adults, as well as Dosenbach’s own brain, which he had imaged and studied extensively.

“Part of Daniel’s brain structure is gone,” Laumann explained, referring to their analysis of the MRI data. “He’s missing almost a quarter of his cortex.”

The dead tissue was replaced by pockets of cerebrospinal fluid, which acts as a shock absorber, as well as delivering nutrients and removing waste. The surviving neurons formed interconnected islands that restored cognitive and motor functions, and neighbourhoods of healthy tissue were again reconnected.

“Our findings illustrate the brain’s tenacity at reorganizing and recovering functions damaged by a massive stroke affecting both sides of his brain,” Dosenbach said. “Future studies of functional remapping relative to tissue loss may provide additional insights. Our results raise the possibility that variability in outcomes may depend on specific features unique to an individual’s brain.”

Despite the extensive damage, Daniel completed tertiary education and now works as a diesel mechanic.

“His stroke still shocks me,” Kellie Carr said. “How could I have not known? But looking back, maybe it was better that way. I might have babied Daniel and been afraid to let him be a regular kid. Maybe the best thing for him was living normally.”

Daniel agreed: “I think about my right hand daily because I have to constantly think five steps ahead to figure out how to compensate for not being able to use it properly, like I did with the baseball glove. But the last thing I want is for people to act like something is wrong with me. I’m fine.”

Source: Medical Xpress

Journal information: Timothy O Laumann et al. Brain network reorganisation in an adolescent after bilateral perinatal strokes, The Lancet Neurology (2021). DOI: 10.1016/S1474-4422(21)00062-4

Categories : Neurology PaediatricsTags :

Early Interventions May Improve Infant Brain Health

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Image by Raman Oza from Pixabay

At the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s (CNS) annual meeting, researchers from the University of Minnesota presented their work on early interventions to ameliorate negative effects on infant brain health.

Their two interventions consist of using engineered gut microbes for antibiotic-exposed infants and the other is a choline supplement to treat infants exposed to alcohol in the womb.

Dr Gale’s new research shows that infants with different compositions of gut bacteria process auditory and visual stimuli differently during memory tasks. “These results raise the possibility that gut bacteria are involved in the development of brain function,” she said.

The study compared the brain activity of infants who received antibiotics within their first month of life to those who did not. Using EEG, the researchers recorded a type of electrical activity called event related potentials (ERPs) in the infants’ brains in response to either their mother’s voice or a stranger’s voice – a “recognition memory” that can be assessed in preverbal infants before any behavioral changes are apparent. This has been shown to be an effective assessment of many aspects of cognitive development.

“Recognition memory is one of the earliest types of explicit memory to develop and is known to be dependent on medial temporal lobe structures, including the hippocampus, the brain region affected by microbiome perturbation in animal models,” explained Dr Cheryl Gale, of the University of Minnesota.

The ERP measurements of infants exposed to antibiotics showed an abnormal response to their mother’s voices compared to those unexposed.
While antibiotics were associated with impact on brain function, a causal relationship could not be established. “We don’t yet know if there is a definitive cause and effect relationship between microbes and brain function in human infants, but future research will hopefully be able to shed light on this,” Gale says.

The work raises the prospect of creating engineered microbes as an early life intervention. “Infancy is a critical time window for brain development, when therapeutic interventions can have effects for the life-course,” Gale said.

The other study was on foetal alcohol exposure, which is still a widespread problem, involved in some 8 in 1000 births worldwide, resulting in serious cognitive consequences. Dr Jeff Wozniak became aware of a lack of neural imaging studies in this very high-need population.

“So I became interested in using some of the tools that we had available here at the University of Minnesota to do high-quality imaging of brain structure and function in this understudied population to learn something about how the brain is altered by prenatal alcohol exposure at the earliest stages of development,” he said.

Together with colleagues, they identified a number of pathways by which alcohol impacts the foetus, such as interfering with the myelination of nerves. The researchers came up with a treatment: choline, an essential nutrient. This has been used in a number of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials in 2-5 year olds with foetal alcohol exposure.
Children receiving choline early in life showed higher non-verbal intelligence, higher visual-spatial skill, higher working memory ability, better verbal memory, and fewer behavioral symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than those in the placebo group.

“The further back you go and do your intervention, the more leverage you have to alter the developmental trajectory of that particular child,” Dr Wozniak said. “So that was the exciting thing about bringing those children back and looking at their development and seeing much larger choline versus placebo effects in cognitive functions like working memory and even behavioural differences in terms of ADHD.”

Source: News-Medical.Net

Categories : Mental Health NeurologyTags :

Repurposed Drug Exploits Ion Channel in The Brain To Treat Depression

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Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital have repurposed a drug to treat depression by using an ion channel that is a completely different mechanism than regular antidepressants.

A study demonstrated that a drug called ezogabine, which opens KCNQ2/3 type of potassium channels in the brain, is linked to significant improvements in depressive symptoms and anhedonia (a lack of ability to feel pleasure) in patients with depression. Anhedonia is a complex, core symptom of depression and is associated with poor outcomes such as increased risk of suicide and reduced responsiveness to antidepressants.
Ezogabine is an anticonvulsant for epilepsy treatment; this novel application in treating depression opens up the investigation of the KCNQ2/3 channel as a potential drug target.

“Our study is the first randomized, placebo-controlled trial to show that a drug affecting this type of ion channel in the brain can improve depression and anhedonia in patients. Targeting this channel represents a completely different mechanism of action than any currently available antidepressant treatment,” said Professor James Murrough, MD, PhD, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and senior author of the paper.

The KCNQ2/3 channel belongs to the KCNQ (or Kv7) family of ion channels which are important controllers of brain cell excitability and function in the central nervous system, affecting brain cell function by controlling electrical charge flow across the cell membrane in the form of potassium (K+) ions. Previous research in mice also showed involvement of KCNQ2/3 in depression. Mice that were more resilient to stress had increased KCNQ2/3 channels in their brains.

“We viewed enhanced functioning of the KCNQ channel as a potential molecular mechanism of resilience to stress and depression,” said Ming-Hu-Han, PhD, who also discovered that by increasing the activity of this channel, such as by administering ezogabine, to depressed mice, the drug acted as an antidepressant.

A trial with adult human patients showed that, compared to placebo, those treated with ezogabine showed a large reduction in a number of key measures of depression severity, anhedonia, and overall illness severity.
“The fundamental insight by Dr Han’s group that a drug that essentially mimicked a mechanism of stress resilience in the brain could represent a whole new approach to the treatment of depression was very exciting to us,” said Dr Murrough.

In collaboration with Dr Han, Dr Murrough carried out a series of human studies, with an initial open-label (no placebo) study in patients with depression providing initial evidence that ezogabine could improve symptoms of depression and anhedonia.

“I think it’s fair to say that most of us on the study team were quite surprised at the large size of the beneficial effect of ezogabine on clinical symptoms across multiple measures related to depression. We are greatly encouraged by these findings and the hope they offer for the prospect of developing novel, effective treatments for depression and related disorders. New treatments are urgently needed given that more than one-third of people suffering from depression are inadequately treated with currently approved therapeutics.”

Source: Eureka Alert

Categories : Gender NeurologyTags :

LGBTQ Concerns Put Brain Imaging Study on Hold

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Person holding rainbow-themed cake slice. Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash.

A study investigating brain functions of gender dysphoria at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, has been put on hold after concerns from LGBTQ groups.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders, gender dysphoria is a “marked incongruence between their experienced or expressed gender and the one they were assigned at birth.” Gender Justice LA and the California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network released a joint statement, citing major ethical concerns.

Study leader Jamie Feusner, MD, a psychiatrist, told MedPage Today that he has asked UCLA’s Institutional Review Board to “re-review our entire protocol to ensure that it meets all ethics and safety standards.”

He added that his team is “actively engaged with members of the LGBTQ community” to help inform potential adjustments to study protocols. It wasn’t clear whether the entire study is on hold or just enrollment of new participants.

Ezak Perez, executive director of Gender Justice LA, wrote that the “research design unapologetically aims to cause mental health distress to trigger ‘dysphoria’ to an already marginalised and vulnerable community.”

The advocacy groups said that researchers from the Semel Institute reached out to the transgender, gender non-conforming, and intersex community in the region to take part in a meeting to help the study design. When they expressed concerns during this meeting and realised the study was already underway with approval from the IRB, leaders from Gender Justice LA and the California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network wrote a letter to UCLA’s Office of the Human Research Protection Program.

“The researchers are falsely advertising this study without clarity about the expectations of participants and without consideration of the need for direct access to mental health after care,” wrote Perez and Dannie Cesena, program manager of LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network.

The call for participants was for looking for transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender adults to complete an assessment and one or more MRI scans. Participants would also be “photographed from the neck down while wearing a unitard,” a point of contention cited by Perez in his statement. The enrollment announcement also noted that participants who experience discomfort during this process could withdraw from the study at any point. Requirements included not being psychiatric medications, and that trans and nonbinary participants could not already be on hormone therapy or have had gender-affirming surgery. Participants would be paid a small amount and have expenses reimbursed.

The study in question would use the ‘body morph’ test, designed in 2015 by Feusner and colleagues. During the test, participants are photographed from various angles in a nude-colored, full-body unitard, with faces, hand and feet cropped out.. Participant images are then morphed with pictures of different bodies.

Writing to MedPage Today, Feusner and co-researcher Ivanka Savic-Berglund, MD, PhD, wrote that at the time that Feusner created the ‘body morph’ test, “experiences of body-self incongruence were not easily understood. The test uses images to estimate the degree of alignment between individuals’ body perception and their gender-specific self-identity.”

Perez and Cesena strongly objected to the idea that capturing the neurological response of gender dysphoria through brian imaging could provide any scientific data that could ‘help’ trans people.

“It is suggestive of a search for medical ‘cure,’ which can open the door for more gatekeeping and restrictive policies and practices in relation to access to gender-affirming care,” the letter stated.

Feusner and Savic-Berglund, however, explained that “by demonstrating that body-self incongruence was linked to brain structure and function, we aimed to help provide a biological basis and increase empathy for the life stories of transgender individuals. From the beginning, the aim was to help increase acceptance of transgender individuals.”

Source: MedPage Today

Categories : Ageing NeurologyTags :

Jump-Starting Neural Stem Cells in Aged Brains

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As we age, neural stem cells lose the ability to divide and create new neurons, resulting in a decline in memory. Now, research led by Sebastian Jessberger, a professor at the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich, explains why this happens.

The new neurons are used all over the brain, including the hippocampus which is responsible for memory. Declines here from age and Alzheimer’s mean fewer neurons are produced here, impacting memory functions.

“As we get older, stem cells throughout the body gradually lose their ability to proliferate. Using genetic engineering and cutting-edge microscope technology, we were able to identify a mechanism that is associated with this process,” explained doctoral candidate and first author Khadeesh bin Imtiaz. The results were published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

The study used a mouse model to show that as organisms age, neurons’ ability to divide becomes impaired. Protein structures ensure that accumulated harmful proteins are laid out unequally among the two daughter neurons, important for the longevity of neurons. As the neurons age, the amount of nucleic proteins changes, resulting in impaired distribution of proteins, reducing the number of newly generated neurons in the brains of older mice.

The researchers identified a nuclear protein called lamin B1, levels of which decrease as people age. When lamin B1 was increased in aged mice, there was an improvement in stem cell division and the number of neurons increased.

The study was part of wider research into ageing and stem cells. “While our study was limited to brain stem cells, similar mechanisms are likely to play a key role when it comes to the ageing process of other stem cells,” said Prof Jessberger.

The latest findings represent an important step in understanding how brain stem cells change with age. “We now know that we can reactivate aging stem cells in the brain. Our hope is that these findings will one day help increase levels of neurogenesis, for example in older people or those suffering from degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Even if this may still be many years in the future,” concluded Prof Jessberger.

Source: Medical Xpress

Journal information: Cell Stem Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2021.01.015

Categories : NeurologyTags :

Long-term Anaesthesia Causes Changes in Neural Connections

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New research has shown that there may be neurological consequences after long-term anaesthesia.

Prolonged anesthesia, also known as medically induced coma, takes the brain to a state of deep unconsciousness beyond short-term anaesthesia for surgical procedures. It is used to treat refractory intracranial hypertension and status epilepticus.

Though they are life-saving practices performed in ICUs the world over, they are not without cognitive side effects. Family members often report that their loved ones are not quite the same when they are discharged from hospital following prolonged anaesthesia.

“It is long known that ICU survivors suffer lasting cognitive impairment, such as confusion and memory loss, that can languish for months and, in some cases, years,” said lead author Michael Wenzel, MD, a former postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University with experience as a physician in neuro-intensive care in Germany.

Dr Wenzel said cognitive dysfunction after hospitalisation will likely become more widespread in the wake of COVID, with large numbers of ventilated patients awakening from days to weeks of unconsciousness.

Senior author Rafael Yuste, a professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia and senior author of the paper said that to date there had been no research on the direct effects of anaesthesia on neural connections.

“This is because it is difficult to examine the brains of patients at a resolution high enough to monitor connections between individual neurons,” Yuste said.

Yuste and Wenzel sought to investigate the connections between neurons, or synapses, and related cognitive effects of prolonged anaesthesia, using mice. With a specially built miniature ‘ICU’ for mice, they performed continuous anaesthesia for up to 40 hours, much longer than the longest animal study so far.

The researchers used in vivo two-photon microscopy to observe cortical synapses in the sensory cortex, combined with repeated assessment of behaviour in the cortex.

They found that, contrary to the view that neural connections in adult brains are stable in short-term anaesthesia, in long-term anaesthesia there are significant changes in synaptic architecture at any age.

“Our results should ring an alarm bell in the medical community, as they document a physical link between cognitive impairment and prolonged medically induced coma,” Wenzel said.

Further study is needed, the researchers said, adding that it will be important to test a range of anesthetics, as well as the combination of anesthetics administered to patients. Anaesthetics are not tailored to patients in any systematic fashion.

“We are well aware that anaesthesia is a life-saving procedure,” Wenzel said. “Refining treatment plans for patients and developing supportive therapies that keep the brain in shape during prolonged anaesthesia would substantially improve clinical outcomes for those whose lives are saved, but whose quality of life has been compromised.”

Source: Medical Xpress

Journal information: Michael Wenzel et al, Prolonged anesthesia alters brain synaptic architecture, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2023676118

Categories : Injury & Trauma Neurology Pain ManagementTags :

New Surgery Improves Prosthetic Use and Reduces Pain

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A new type of surgery that links muscles together may improve the precision of prosthetic use and also relieve pain.

In typical amputations, the muscle pairs (such as triceps and biceps) that work together to control the joints are severed. However, an MIT team has discovered that reconnecting these muscles that are in an agonistic-antagonistic (‘push-pull’) relationship improves the sensory feedback and thus precision of the affected limb.

“When one muscle contracts, the other one doesn’t have its antagonist activity, so the brain gets confusing signals,” explained Srinivasan, a former member of the Biomechatronics group now working at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “Even with state-of-the-art prostheses, people are constantly visually following the prosthesis to try to calibrate their brains to where the device is moving.”

The 15 patients who received the AMI surgery were able to flex their prosthetic ankle joint with more precision than those without it, who were only able to fully extend or flex their joint.

“Through surgical and regenerative techniques that restore natural agonist-antagonist muscle movements, our study shows that persons with an AMI amputation experience a greater phantom joint range of motion, a reduced level of pain, and an increased fidelity of prosthetic limb controllability,” says Hugh Herr, a professor of media arts and sciences, head of the Biomechatronics group in the Media Lab, and the senior author of the paper.

The surgery also had a completely unexpected benefit: the reduction of pain in the amputated area, which can be from neuromas or phantom limb pain. Phantom limb pain can occur in 80% of amputess. Six of the 15 AMI patients reported zero pain. This may be significant as in the five centuries since phantom limb pain was first described, there has not been much advancement in the understanding of it.

“Our study wasn’t specifically designed to achieve this, but it was a sentiment our subjects expressed over and over again. They had a much greater sensation of what their foot actually felt like and how it was moving in space,” Srinivasan says. “It became increasingly apparent that restoring the muscles to their normal physiology had benefits not only for prosthetic control, but also for their day-to-day mental well-being.”

To treat patients who had received the traditional amputation surgery, the team is also working on using muscle grafts to create a ‘regenerative AMI’ procedure that restores the effect of agonist and antagonist muscles.

Source: Medical Xpress

Journal information: Shriya S. Srinivasan el al., “Neural interfacing architecture enables enhanced motor control and residual limb functionality postamputation,” PNAS (2021). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.2019555118

Categories : NeurologyTags :

Short Window for Recovery After Stroke

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Researchers have found that there is a short window for brain repair to be most effective after a stroke, which peaked at two weeks after the incident.

Brain scans conducted by the study showed that the brains of stroke survivors retained plasticity and an improved ability to rewire itself, the first time this had been observed in humans. The study took place in Adelaide and London.

The researchers regularly scanned the brains of 60 stroke survivors as they recovered over a period of 12 months. To assess neural plasticity, the researchers repeatedly activated the brain’s motor cortex using continuous transcranial magnetic stimulation (cTBS). The laboratory in London tested the non-damaged motor cortex, which is also important for stroke recovery while the one in Adelaide tested the damaged motor cortex. In the first few days following an ischaemic stroke, the brain had greater plasticity.

“Earlier animal studies suggested this was the case, but this is the first time we have conclusively demonstrated this phenomenon exists in humans,” Dr Hordacre said.

Only eight minutes of daily rehabilitation time after a stroke is spent on the upper limbs.

“Delivering more treatment within this brief window is needed to help people recover after a stroke,” Dr Hordacre said. “The next step is to identify techniques which prolong or even re-open a period of increased brain plasticity, so we can maximise recovery.”

Source: News-Medical.Net

Journal information: Hordacre, B., et al. (2021) Evidence for a Window of Enhanced Plasticity in the Human Motor Cortex Following Ischemic Stroke. doi.org/10.1177/1545968321992330.